Kerlin Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by acclaimed artist Callum Innes. The exhibition presents new paintings on aluminium, oil paintings on linen and pastel works on paper. Innes’ first solo exhibition in Dublin since 2012, it opens with a reception in the company of the artist on Thursday 7 September, 6–8pm.

On the long wall of the gallery, Innes presents a new series of paintings made on large-scale, asymmetric aluminium panels. These works are a subtle sculptural extension of the site-specific, monochromatic wall paintings Innes first created for his recent survey exhibition at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Each painting is subtly distorted by an almost imperceptible curve on one or more sides. The large-scale panels both occupy and activate the wall on which they hang, expanding the pictorial field of the viewer, creating subtly undulated spatial and perceptual references.

A related series of new pastel works on paper hangs on the opposite wall. Though they may initially appear as straightforward, abstract rectangular compositions of flat colour, a deep richness reveals itself upon closer inspection. Deep and vibrant hues of pastel chalks have been heavily worked and rubbed into the handmade paper, nearly covering the entire surface with a seductive and velvety texture. Hints of underlyning layers of contrasting colour are most evident at the decalled edges of the works, exposing traces of the human gesture.

This series of recent paintings presents a continuation of the artists consideration of symbolism in imagery and throughout the history of painting. He continues to manipulate the painted surface through layering, illusion, simulation and depth. Within Nugent’s work there is always a sense that the painted surface is hiding something, that preceding layers have been veiled and that hidden elements may reveal themselves over time spent looking at each composition.

This September, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Irish artist Gavin Murphy. Entitled ‘Double Movement’, the exhibition will include new works in film, sculpture, text and photography made by the artist based on his in-depth research into the now defunct Eblana theatre, which was located in the basement cinema of Dublin’s famous central bus station Busáras.

The Busáras building itself was a visionary and contested scheme. At that time, the largest civic building project in post-war Europe, it was lauded and visited by architects from across the continent. Designed by Michael Scott and Partners, the building was envisaged as a kind of civic Gesamtkunstwerk (or ‘total art work’), to serve the practical, social and cultural needs of its public users. Influenced by the Swiss Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire in Paris and by the Salvation Army hostel in Paris (both by Le Corbusier) it was to include a top floor public restaurant which was to become a night-club in the evening, a crèche for children, a bicycle park, and a ‘rather stylish’ cinema theatre in its basement, complete with a big ‘free-standing screen, with a cantilevered platform out in front… which could be used for lectures’. An expression of modern Ireland, the building was also the main hub whereby Irish people would leave the country, travelling by bus and then by boat to the UK and further afield from the late 40s onwards.

Following the much-delayed opening of Busáras to the Irish public in October 1953, the basement newsreel Cinema lay idle, until repurposed into a theatre in late 1959. Shortly afterwards, it was taken on by actress Phyllis Ryan as a base for her Gemini theatre company, who were to become a major producer of new plays in Ireland. At a time when the national theatre was not seen to be supporting new writing, Phyllis and Gemini are credited with maintaining independent theatre in Ireland during the period. The Eblana premièred the work of Irish playwrights including Brian Friel, John. B. Keane, and Aodhán Madden, and brought the work of playwrights ranging from Tennessee Williams to Neil Simon, Alan Ayckbourn to Joe Orton to a Dublin audience. It staged plays ranging from populist revues to experimental works, and covered taboo subjects in Ireland of the time such as homosexuality, homelessness and criticism of the Catholic Church. However the artistic fortunes of Gemini and the Eblana gradually declined, and the theatre was eventually closed in 1995, though it remains – albeit in poor condition – underneath the station.

Since 2015, Murphy has been working with the Irish Theatre Archive and the Irish Architecture Foundation, on an intensive period of research on the history of Busáras, the Eblana Theatre and the programme of the Gemini theatre company, visiting the archives of Arup (in Dublin and London), Scott Tallon Walker, The Abbey, and Dublin City Archives. Underground takes on a double meaning here, where the Eblana has taken on significance for Murphy as a representation of the lifecycle of an artist-run cultural organisation. Using a variety of techniques including documentary film, voiceover, performance and dance, sculptural installation and photography, Murphy’s work seeks to visualise the energy and passion that is needed to maintain a cultural venue like the Eblana, as well as to articulate the significance these types of projects can have in society, only to be almost completely forgotten shortly thereafter. The work in ‘Double Movement’, as well as documenting histories around architecture and theatre in Ireland, highlights gaps in our collective memories, bringing these forgotten energies and social movements to our attention. Art can profoundly change a society from the inside out, and Murphy’s work not only helps us to remember the Eblana theatre as it was, and make its cultural importance contemporary again, but also invites us to contemplate the society in which it was formed, the precursor to contemporary Ireland.

The exhibition also features contributions from many longstanding and new collaborators in the realisation of these works, with thanks to: Oran Day, Karl Burke, Louis Haugh, Michael Kelly, Justine Cooper, Des Nealon, Peter Mulvaney, Eve Woods, Philip White, Morris Deegan and Michael Daly.

‘Double Movement’ is funded by The Arts Council and The Arup Trust, and is supported by The Irish Architecture Foundation and The Irish Theatre Archive, with thanks to Scott Tallon Walker Architects, Dublin City Archives and Project Arts Centre.

Gavin Murphy (b. Dublin, 1973) is a Dublin-based artist and curator with an interest in documenting cultural spaces and histories. His research-based, intertextual practice involves the assemblage of unique fabricated elements, sourced and found objects, images and texts, with an interest in the sculptural possibilities of cinematic structures and mise en scène.

Solo exhibitions include ‘In Art We Are Poor Citizens’ (part of the ‘Sleepwalkers’ series, 2014) and ‘Remember’ (2010), both Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; ‘Colophon’, Oonagh Young Gallery (2012), and ‘Something New Under the Sun’, Royal Hibernian Academy (2012). Group exhibitions include ‘Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio’, BOZAR, Brussels (2013), and ‘After the Future’, eva International, Limerick (2012). His work features in several publications including ‘Sleepwalkers’, published by Ridinghouse in 2015, and a monograph ‘On Seeing Only Totally New Things’ which was published by Royal Hibernian Academy, 2013.

He is the recipient of various Arts Council awards, and residencies at Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne. He is co-director/curator of the artist-run space, Pallas Projects/Studios, and was co-editor of the recent publication Artist-Run Europe, published by Onomatopee.

The title of Brendan Earley’s solo exhibition refers to one place and to many. It marks the retreat into the wilderness; from childhood memories to eighteenth century rural landscapes of Wicklow by James Arthur O’Connor; from 1970s folk groups to long walks along the river Dargle, as well as the films of John Boorman made in Ardmore Studios. Working across sculpture, print and drawings, Earley’s work conjures another place and another time.

As Earley states “…it starts with the walk out here to the hinterland where my studio is and then I begin. I find the world increasingly not making sense so here in the studio I manufacture sense.” (1) A new series of drawings based loosely on the seminal psychedelic folk rock group Dr. Strangely Strange harks back to a bucolic time often associated with the Romantic landscape tradition. Similar sentiments are echoed in a large silkscreen print of another Irish folk group with its roots in Wicklow, The Woods Band, married with material most often found in tents as well as tie-dye silk prints, de rigueur at the time. This blending of past passion, present moments, and possible futures, becomes a form in which we can become enraptured. As Brian Dillon has written, “Earley’s sculpture’s and drawings constitute an intervention into apparently familiar territory that is at once oblique and immersive.” (2)

The hinterland. A place of refuge or a place to make a new place….this is the 'back of beyond'.

As part of the exhibition, works have been installed in the Geography Department’s Freeman Library located on the ground floor of the Museum Building on campus. Visitors are invited to explore the Library during its opening hours. With special thanks to Trinity College’s Geography Department and especially Gillian Marron, Librarian.

This exhibition has been supported by Wicklow County Council.

The opening of the exhibition has been kindly sponsored by O'Hara's Irish Craft Beer.

Parallel Talks, Events and Film Screenings

To coincide with these solo exhibitions there is a programme of talks, readings, events and film screenings developed in collaboration with the artists.

Brendan Earley lives and works in Wicklow. Recent solo exhibitions include; mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2017); mother’s tankstation, Dublin (2014), 'In The Midnight City', Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing (2013); and 'A Place Between', Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2012). His work has been included in group exhibitions in galleries such as Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork (2016); 'Gatherings', Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, New York (2015); TULCA Festival of Visual Art, Galway (2014); and 'All Humans Do', White Box, New York (2012). His work is in numerous private and public collections. He is represented by mother’s tankstation.

Isabel Nolan began a recent lecture with the title, “Just because the universe is probably real it doesn’t mean it is not weird or puzzling to be here.” (1) The second part was announced as, “I am powerfully confused.” These utterances indicate the expansive, yet profoundly impractical, ambition of her enquiry and her work. Setting the scene for this solo exhibition, Nolan described her problematic attraction to certain seductive and powerful cultural forms. From eighteenth century museums to sculpted Greco-Roman warriors and Gothic Cathedrals, Nolan attends to their grandeur and authority in a way that is at once fascinated, resentful and inappropriate. The resulting works are both intimate with and alienated from the spaces and objects that inspire them.

Comprising suspended and floor-based sculptures, portrait paintings, drawings, photographs and a rug, these new works unsettle simple certainties such as up and down, high and low. Nolan inhabits and collapses those hierarchies that order experience and expectation. Fallen chandelier-like forms, which cast fabric instead of light; carved pieces of ‘dust’, drawings and photographs of sculpted and living feet, beautiful floors and dirty pavements, are inhabited by an unlikely cast of figures: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), disgraced theologian and cosmological theorist; philosopher and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943), artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) and the malevolent figure of fictional mobster Tony Soprano (1959-2007). Only the latter believes that the world is as it seems to be, “You are born to this shit, you are what you are’. The others, in their singular ways, negotiated with existence. Their diverse ideas sought to reframe reality and upset aspects of the status quo, as arguably, they attempted to find a way for humans to love the universe.

Circles feature throughout the show, from the centrally placed, suspended steel sculpture, ‘Tomb (for an angel’s wing)', to the ersatz ‘chandeliers’, or many of the hand-sized, sculpted shapes of What kind of dust is it?, to the pinched finger and thumb of the wholly absorbed thorn-puller, the 'Spinario'. These works invite us to look down into them. Feet also recur throughout, also drawing our gaze low. The delicate toes of the aforementioned thorn–puller to the great rounded toes of King Francis the 1st as depicted on his tomb to the feet of museum visitors. As Nolan writes, “Feet insist that we are of the earth; they can only very briefly escape the surface of the world. In works of art toes generally point up, soles are exposed, only when someone is dying, dead or fast asleep.”

The metaphoric intertwining of death and feet with lowness; the desire to overcome both mortality and animality with grandeur; and an enduring preoccupation with defying gravity connects these disparate works. Nolan is continually drawn to moments of coherence that contain intimations of their collapse or demise. Her work unhinges the pain, intangibility, irreverence, and joy, of human existence. 'Calling on Gravity’ continues her material exploration of metaphor, and how we bring the world into meaning.

Parallel Talks, Events and Film Screenings

To coincide with these solo exhibitions there is a programme of talks, readings, events and film screenings developed in collaboration with the artists, including a conversation between Isabel Nolan and writer Martin Herbert on 6 September 2017.

The opening of this exhibition is kindly sponsored by O'Hara's Irish Craft Beer.

The IMMA Collection has secured an important long-term loan of 50 works by Lucian Freud (1922-2011), regarded as one of the world’s greatest realist painters. The works, on loan from private collections, will be presented in a dedicated Freud Centre in IMMA’s Garden Galleries for five years and will be titled IMMA Collection: Freud Project, 2016 – 2021. With this extraordinary resource IMMA will create a centre for Freud research with a special programme of exhibitions, education partnerships, symposia and research that will maximise this important opportunity for Irish school children, third level students, artists and audiences all over Ireland and beyond.

Lucian Freud is considered one of the greatest figurative painters of the 20th-century. He is renowned for his portrayal of the human form, working only from life, and is best known for his portraits and nudes. Freud’s studio life was intensely private and he mainly worked with those he was close to. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project features a selection of the artist’s finest paintings, as well as numerous etchings. Among those represented are members of his family: his children, grandchildren, his mother Lucie and intimate friends as well as works that reflect his interest in animals and nature. Ranging across six decades, the works on loan will focus on several of the artist’s key areas of interest, including paintings of the same person at different ages, self-portraits, and double portraits.

The project will look at Freud’s role and legacy, not only in contemporary art and the history of figuration but also within specific themes around portraiture, self-portraiture, aging, still life, the psychology of space. The project will also explore his connections with Irish art developments from the early 1950s in particular, as a teacher at the Slade School, and as part of the Soho artistic milieu along with Francis Bacon, that drew Irish artists and writers including Patrick Swift, Edward McGuire, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin and many others. Freud made several working visits to Dublin, where he found the rawness of the city of that time stimulating.

This is an incredible opportunity for Dublin. The IMMA Collection: Freud Project, placed alongside the Francis Bacon’s Studio at Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, will uniquely present two of the 20th-century’s greatest figurative painters in the same city for a five year duration.

About the artist

Lucian Freud, grandson of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, was born in 1922 in Berlin and emigrated with his family to the UK at the age of 11. He studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and the Cedric Morris’s East Anglican School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham. His first solo exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944, featured the now celebrated painting The Painter’s Room, 1944. Since then Freud became one of the best-known and most highly-regarded British artists of recent times. He was awarded the Companion of Honour and the Order of Merit.

Freud painted notable figures including Elizabeth II, Lord Rothschild, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, Kate Moss and fellow artists Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney. Freud was the subject of numerous museum retrospectives and exhibitions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, MOMA New York; the Museo Correr, Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Tate Britain; the Scottish National Art Gallery and at IMMA in 2007. A major retrospective took place at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2012, a year after the artist’s passing.